No. 1 Fan Plays Host To Legends Of Baseball

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: March 31, 2001

WASHINGTON, March 30—
He grew up wanting to be a professional baseball player, can instantly name the sport's most valuable players for just about any year and paved the path for his political career by partly owning and helping to run the Texas Rangers.

So what took place in the East Room of the White House today was more than just another photo opportunity for President Bush, more than just the latest exercise in presidential imagery. Surrounded by dozens of aging Hall of Famers, Mr. Bush was living a personal fantasy and the expression on his face was one of unalloyed joy.

He recalled the first baseball game he had ever attended, a memory that seemed as fresh to him as yesterday, and what came out next sounded as genuine as anything he had ever said.

''Gentlemen,'' he told his guests, ''if you're half as excited to be at the White House as I was that afternoon, I'm really glad to replay -- repay -- the favor.''

That little stutter presents a perfect segue into a mention of Yogi Berra, the former catcher for the New York Yankees, who was there both as baseball legend and oratorical muse, a man just as given to verbal pratfalls and grammatical conundrums as the president tends to be. They might sportingly be called fellow idiom savants. And Mr. Bush, who has lately lifted self-deprecation into a presidential leitmotif, was happy to acknowledge their kinship.

''Yogi's been an inspiration to me,'' he said, pausing for the copious laughter, ''not only because of his baseball skills, but, of course, for the enduring mark he left on the English language.''

''Some in the press corps here even think he might be my speechwriter,'' Mr. Bush added.

The president noted that he had cited one of Mr. Berra's most famous fractured aphorisms in his budget address to Congress in February -- ''When you come to a fork in the road, take it.''

Mr. Berra was scrunched between baseball giant after baseball giant: the pitchers Whitey Ford and Nolan Ryan, the catcher Johnny Bench, the outfielder Stan Musial. All were bound for a subsequent lunch with the president, and it was a decent bet that carbon dioxide emissions and marginal tax rates would not be a part of the conversational menu.

But their visit to the White House was just one of many examples of the president's love affair with the sport, which he was happily professing as a prelude to Opening Day.

He announced today that he would dedicate a portion of the South Lawn at the White House to a pint-sized baseball field, so that, for the next four baseball seasons at least, young children from the Washington area could come over to play T-ball.

''In a small way,'' Mr. Bush explained, ''maybe we can help to preserve the best of baseball right here in the house that Washington built.''

Mr. Bush takes this passion pretty far. After his inauguration, the first full-fledged national interview that he gave was to Bob Costas, a sports commentator with a new show on HBO. Mr. Bush was as relaxed and voluble as he had yet seemed in Washington as he ticked off trivia and pondered the state of the game.

He regularly inserted baseball metaphors and baseball stories into his presidential campaign. At a debate in South Carolina, when he was asked about the biggest mistake he had made in life, he said it was trading away Sammy Sosa, who went on to home run-slugging fame.

During the recount in Florida, the book he read was the biography of Joe DiMaggio by Richard Ben Cramer. And on April 6, Mr. Bush is scheduled to throw out the first ball in the home opener at the new stadium of the Milwaukee Brewers.

In plugging baseball at the White House today, Mr. Bush was arguably giving a little help to his friends; he has quite a few associates still involved in the sport and still profiting from it.

But he was also clearly speaking from the heart.

''Baseball isn't just in the stats -- though, of course, that's part of it,'' Mr. Bush said. ''It isn't just the money. It really isn't who makes the Hall of Fame. As much as anything else, baseball is the style of a Willie Mays, or the determination of a Hank Aaron, or the endurance of a Mickey Mantle.''

''Whatever else changes,'' he later added, ''even if the same nine innings run longer and the fly balls farther, and the grass isn't always grass like it should be, those values are still what makes the boys and girls and the fans and players into legends.''

Photo: President Bush, an avid baseball fan, took some of his heroes out to the East Room yesterday. Yogi Berra turned the tables on the fan. (Associated Press)